RSS Dashboard, Hardware Filesharing, Making is Learning, and Revenue/Customer

The PirateBox — small piece of hardware that creates a wifi network for local filesharing. Not connected to the Internet. (via BoingBoing)

More Hammer, Less Yammer (Julian Bleecker) — If you’re not also making — you’re sort of, well..basically you’re not doing much at all. You’ve only done a rough sketch of an idea if you’ve only talked about it and didn’t do the iteration through making, then back to thinking and through again to talking and discussing and sharing all the degrees of material — idea, discussions, conversations, make some props, bring those to the discussion, repeat. Why O’Reilly prefers makers to fakers.

The Diary of Samuel Pepys — a remarkable mashup of historical information and literature in modern technology to make the Pepys diaries an experience rather than an object. It includes historical weather, glosses, maps, even an encyclopedia. (prompted by Jon Udell)

The Tonido Plug Server — one of many such wall-wart sized appliances. This caught my eye: CodeLathe, the folks behind Tonido, have developed a web interface and suite of applications. The larger goal is to get developers to build other applications for inclusion in Tonido’s own app store.

Wikileaks Fails “Due Diligence” Review — interesting criticism of Wikileaks from Federation of American Scientists. “Soon enough,” observed Raffi Khatchadourian in a long profile of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange in The New Yorker (June 7), “Assange must confront the paradox of his creation: the thing that he seems to detest most-power without accountability-is encoded in the site’s DNA, and will only become more pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution.” (via Hacker News)

Yahoo Style Guide — a paper book, but also a web site with lots of advice for those writing online.

10TB of US PTO Data (Google Books) — the PTO has entered into a two year deal with Google to distribute patent and trademark data for free. At the moment it’s 10TB of images and full text of grants, applications, classifications, and more, but it will grow over time: in the future we will be making more data available including file histories and related data. (via Google Public Policy blog post)

DSL for NLP Task, Insider Tradespotting, Outsource Fail, Cloud Fail

Snowball — a small string processing language designed for creating stemming algorithms for use in Information Retrieval. (via straup on delicious)

Insider Trades — a Yahoo! Hack Day app that turned out to be worth continuing. Scans SEC systems every 30 seconds and alerts you if the stock you track has been traded by an insider. (via straup on delicious)

Air New Zealand Slams IBM — central point of failure in the outsourced IT. “In my 30-year working career, I am struggling to recall a time where I have seen a supplier so slow to react to a catastrophic system failure such as this and so unwilling to accept responsibility and apologise to its client and its client’s customers is not the glowing endorsement you want.

Danger/Microsoft Loses Sidekick Customers’ Data — Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger’s latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device – such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos – that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger. This cloud had a brown lining.

DIY SPY, Screencasting, Social Network Analysis, Term Extraction

DIY SPY – a homebrew 2.4GHz wi-fi spectrum analyzer — As proof of concept (and a cool toy for anyone who has one of these lying around), I have implemented a working Wi-Fi spectrum analyzer on TI’s ez430-RF2500 development kit ($50), a 2-part USB dongle which consists essentially of a CC2500 radio strapped to an MSP430 low-power microcontroller (detachable bottom half) and a USB interface which enumerates as a virtual serial port (top half). The top half doubles as a standalone MSP430 programmer, so this kit is a great cheap way to get started playing with them. (via joshua on Delicious)

Screenr — Instant screencasts for Twitter. Flash-based, uploads to their site and tweets the URL. The whole “for Twitter” thing is going a little too far: who records screencasts only for Twitter? It’s like having a spellchecker only for three-letter words.

We’re Keeping the Term Extraction Service — Yahoo!’s useful API gets a stay of execution. OK, we heard you. You’ve made it clear to us that shutting down the Term Extraction Service would be a mistake. So, we’ve changed our plans. We’re leaving the service up and running indefinitely. (via Simon Willison)

On this day in history, Mt Fuji exploded (781), Daniel Defoe was put in the stocks for seditious libel but was pelted with flowers (1703), the first U.S. patent was issued (1790), and the radio show The Shadow aired for the first time (1930).

Tokyo Cabinet: Beyond Key-Value Store — description of Tokyo Cabinet and code examples in Ruby. More on the nosql move to leave relational databases behind for certain modern problems (such as scaling).

The Great American Bubble Machine (Rolling Stone) — I know it’s old hat, but read it for the poetry if for nothing else. The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

Twenty Questions, CC Pix, INSERT INTO WEB, and Wash Your Hands!

Twenty Questions about GPLv3 (Jacob Kaplan-Moss) — twenty very challenging questions about the GPLv3. foo.js is a JavaScript library released under the GPLv3. bar.js is a library with all rights reserved. For performance reasons, I would like to minimize all my site’s JavaScript into a single compressed file called foobar.js. If I distribute this file, must I also distribute bar.js under the GPL?

CleanWell — very low-cost recyclable enviro-friendly antimicrobials to battle third-world disease. Met the founder at Sci Foo. He said women wash hands more than men, because women enter bathrooms in pairs. Single easiest way to increase handwashing compliance is to put sinks and basins outside the room, in public view.

Ten Rules That Govern Groups — valuable lessons for all who would create or use social software, each backed up with pointers to the social science study about that lesson. Groups breed competition: While co-operation within group members is generally not so much of a problem, co-operation between groups can be hellish. People may be individually co-operative, but once put in a ‘them-and-us’ situation, rapidly become remarkably adversarial. (via Mind Hacks)

App Engine Conclusions — I’ve reluctantly concluded that I don’t like it. I want to like it, since it’s a great poster child for Python. And there are some bright spots, like the dirt-simple integration with google accounts. But it’s so very very primitive in so many ways. Not just the missing features, or the “you can use any web framework you like, as long as it’s django” attitude, but primarily a lot of the existing API is just so very primitive.

Microsoft Hohm — Sign up with Hohm and we’ll provide you with a home energy report and energy-saving recommendations tailored to your home.Wesabe for power at the moment, with interesting possibilities ahead should Microsoft partner with smartmetering utility companies the way Google Powermeter does. This is notable because this is a web app launched by Microsoft, with no connection to Windows or other Microsoft properties beyond requiring a “Live ID” to login. For commentary, see Microsoft Hohm Gets Green Light for Launch and PC Mag. (via Freaklabs)

Weaker Copyright Good, YQL.gov, GeoSPARQL, Happiness

Harvard Study Finds Weaker Copyright Protection Has Benefited Society (Michael Geist) — Given the increase in artistic production along with the greater public access conclude that “weaker copyright protection, it seems, has benefited society.” This is consistent with the authors’ view that weaker copyright is “uambiguously desirable if it does not lessen the incentives of artists and entertainment companies to produce new works.” (read the original paper)

Using Public Data for Good With the Power of YQL — The first part is a new batch of YQL tables providing data on the U.S. government, earthquake data, and the non-profit micro-lender Kiva. The second part is an incredibly easy way to render YQL queries on websites. After all, what good is data that no one can see?